The bear does not go hunting – Newspaper Kommersant No. 232 (7433) of 12/14/2022

At the box office – Igor Poplaukhin’s film “White Light Converged on You”, an anti-biopic of the last star of the Russian rock underground, Yanka Diaghileva, who drowned near Novosibirsk in May 1991 at the age of 24 under circumstances that have not been clarified. Mikhail Trofimenkov, by no means a fanatic of soil Siberian punk, after watching it, nevertheless, it became a shame for Yanka.

Igor Poplauhin made a film for those who can read. More precisely, for those who read the opening credits to the film. Say, Yanka, the singer, disappeared, died, and this film is a chronicle of her last days. Otherwise, without this title, it would be simply impossible to understand what is happening, or rather, what is not happening on the screen.

Well, yes, well, yes, The Last Days was the title of Gus Van Sant’s (2005) magnificent film, dedicated to the death languor of another rock icon, Kurt Cobain. And Poplauhin blindly, straightforwardly copies the aesthetics of Van Sant, trying to reproduce the atmosphere of eventlessness, pregnant with tragedy. When any little thing – and even the visit of the postman – is perceived as an ominous sign. But in order to achieve that degree of intense premonition of trouble that Van Sant achieved in The Last Days, one must, alas, be Van Sant.

So, what do we see on the screen in “A white light has converged on you like a wedge.” One and a half hours – and it seems that all three – some red-haired girl named Yana (Kira Pievskaya) wanders around the screen. Most of the time she wanders around with a dreary expression on her face, obviously denoting the ultimate existential disappointment in the surrounding reality. A disappointment that will drive her from a vague family party into the cold waters of a Siberian river in the finale, where she will assume, before drowning, the classic Ophelia pose from a Pre-Raphaelite painting by John Everett Millais.

Joylessly picturesque, she catches a sunbeam or raindrops on a plastic film with her hands. He lifts, like an unbearable load, a normal hose, which he looks at like a poisonous snake. In her mouth, the most innocent phrase “We have barbecue here” sounds like a nightmarish replica of the crazy mother of a maniac from “Cargo 200” Alexei Balabanov: “We have flies.”

Sometimes, however, Yana changes her unreasonably sad expression on her face to an equally unreasonably cheerful one. And then she starts running around the country rooms or through the forest, hugging her friend Katya (Ekaterina Yermishina), with whom she will quarrel for no apparent reason. Or, laughing, rub hair dye into the hair of stepbrother Sergei (Georgy Kudrenko). Now, they say, I’ll make an ashen blonde out of you.

The joke, however, sounds quite ominous, if you know what Yana and Sergey are taking with them to the dacha. And they are carrying the ashes of a friend and, obviously, Yana’s lover, who died from an overdose of some pills at her concert. By the way, this is almost the only episode from which it can be understood that Yana is a singer. And even then, right on stage, her voice disappears. What would be extremely unpleasant if Yana sang that furious Siberian rock – “The bear goes hunting to strangle dogs” – which the real Yanka Diaghileva sang. But from the screen, she gives out something indistinct, a kind of ambient, for which the presence of a voice, it seems, is not necessary.

Around a certain Yana, certain characters are circling, whose connections with her can be determined far from immediately. Here is Katya, for example. Is it a friend or such a youthful mother? So the mother that slips in the conversation died. So girlfriend. Then a beautiful gray-haired woman is a stepmother. And the bespectacled man in the hat, indignant that Yana familiarly calls him Stasik, is her father, who gives out a truth that is mysterious even by the standards of the film: “To be afraid of heights is not to go into the forest.” And Sergei, yeah, half-brother. And the bald gopnik with a broken nose (Maxim Kozlov) is like Yegor Letov, to whom the actor looks even less than Yana to Yanka?

They all have one common and unbearable feature – the passion to tell their dreams or phantasmagoric childhood memories. About gypsy sorcerers who sneaked into the house at night to sprinkle salt on the table and stick needles into mattresses. About ball lightning stuck in wires. About how a dead grandmother is looking for her passport. About some strange dog. There is a feeling that you spent an hour and a half in the company of quiet madmen, whose heavy genes ruined the quiet Yana.

What’s left behind the scenes? Yes, almost everything is left, starting from the time of action. The spring of 1991 is a wild, seething punk era, the symbols of which were both Yanka and Letov. It was us, the capital’s boys and girls, who ate the mannered “Aquarium” and “Kino”. And in Siberia, bears strangled dogs. Screen inactivity can be dated to any period from the 1970s to the 2020s, it is so devoid of any specifics. Yanka herself is absent: in the on-screen girl, not the slightest manifestation of at least some spark of God is imperceptible – only quiet schizophrenia. Missing is the environment in which she was cooked and which, as is always the case with rock musicians, is partly to blame for her death. Well, at least on the final credits, the voice of Yankee will sound – a real voice: “And you throw, throw your words into my hole.” But, having sounded, it will only emphasize the tragic gap between the real fate and talent and their screen non-incarnation.